BP: 5 Things Men Should Know

Headquartered in London, BP is the second largest oil company in the world after Exxon Mobil. Founded in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in 1954 it rebranded itself as the British Petroleum Company. It then merged with Amoco in 1998 to become BP, now employing over 80,000 people. Not surprisingly, in a century of doing business in energy and crude oil, it has had its share of environmental disasters, though none quite compare with the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP had been leasing the massive Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf for $502,000 a day from the American company Transocean. The rig was situated over a mile-deep canyon in the Gulf, drilling at a well called Macondo owned by BP. On April 20th, the rig's pressure control systems failed and the well suffered a blowout (imagine a gusher, when a well on dry land blasts oil into the air), causing the rig to explode, killing 11. It sank two days later, and Macondo has been spewing crude oil into the Gulf ever since.

The disaster long ago eclipsed the spill of the Exxon Valdez and is now far and away the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

As the litigation against BP gets underway (and expect it to be epic), and as oil smothers marine life and the Gulf economies suffer, we present five things men should know about BP.

1- BP was the first oil company to acknowledge global climate change

The first thing men should know about BP is that it used to (at least) pretend to care about the environment.

Nowadays, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg mentions caring about "the small people" impacted by the spill, and CEO Andy Hayward bitches about wanting his life back and spending days watching his yacht compete in silly races. But it wasn't always like that at BP.

In 1995, a man named John Browne became the CEO of BP and immediately began to remake the company. Not only did he complete the merger with Amoco and make the company second only to Exxon Mobil, he also spoke out publicly on climate change, becoming the first CEO of his kind to acknowledge the issue and to accept some responsibility in addressing it.

Sadly, Browne felt obligated to resign from his position when his personal life (at the time he was a closeted gay man) threatened to become bigger news than the work BP was doing.

2- BP paid the largest fine ever under the U.S. Clean Air Act

On March 23, 2005, a blowdown stack at the BP Texas City refinery released excess hydrocarbons in vapor and liquid form, and in doing so ignored several provisions of the U.S. Clean Air Act. When the hydrocarbons reached an ignition source — in this case, the running motor of a truck — the result was a massive explosion that killed 15 people. In the aftermath, BP admitted wrongdoing and wound up with a $50 million fine, the largest ever paid under the Clean Air Act. It was put on a three-year probation and required to make sweeping policy changes and structural renovations believed to have cost the company as much as six times the amount of the fine itself.